Forgotten Ground Regained
Lullabyes
Midnight tripped an hour ago and fell into the small hours.Roused from dozing to the slap and howl of nightshift winds my dreamysail-bright craft is bucked and flippedand runs agroundwhen, abruptly, canvas catching breath from half a life away,my mother, wine-remote and mournful, launches into song.
She and her sorrow have spilled over into a third glass tonight-- or so I surmise as,from my leggy sprawl flung idly in the pillowed, twilit room next the tideless, drydock kitchen, dimly candled, ticking tears,
I and my wicking youth, all ears, all ears abrim and baffled, listen.
Listen: for the same two songs she’s always sungmy spooling lifetime’s skein along -- murky, folksy, in that plain,pitch-careful, voice-of-angels way she has.
Bedtimes, back in tuck-in years, she’d kneel by my anchored bed;her hands would trace the contours of my head, and she would sing,
reedy but near-as-can-be true, and always (as if secretly) layered, spun of runes.
I am not schooled in matters of the soul. Buttonight, my brother’s gone, a moth to the guttering collegiate flame;and our father lies asleep, unwell, a tossing raft poling him supine beyond the reach of dreams.
It’s quiet here. And for her voice’s tracery through tiers of pendant light she grants herself a third (translucent green) and lo!the lullabies emerge antique, intact, custodial.
Does she think she’s singing to the soaring, storebought lily? or my absent brother’s mapless fume-and-flare intensity?
No matter. In this spinning hour, these twinned and rising airs are mine when, from a room -- a world -- away,with something more than words entwined,
my mother sings.
Copyright © Rebecca Henry Lowndes, 2002.
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